Charming and well-produced book, ideal for adolescent and wider readerships. ( )

This is for young adults. Not so insightful; middle of the road; a bit of cultural relativism. I listened to it on audio; but I have been told that the illustrations are quite nice, and will check it out in its physical form some day. ( )

A short, very accessible, sweeping history of science. It's more aimed at older children than adults, though, and the content a lot of the time feels rather thin. It would have benefited from at least some illustrations. And at times there are slightly strange intrusions of religious thought.

There were some biographical snippets that were new to me, and the odd clearly explained section. Still, I think Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is superior for the non adult for its engaging and interesting style, even it doesn't cover as much ground, or is so up to date. ( )

Wonderfully crafted brief history of science, from the days when it was considered by Aristotle and his followers to be an aspect of philosophy up to the present. The author is British, and the occasional variant spellings and usages contributed to the charm of the book.
Bynum covers an incredible amount of ground and is able to go into a surprising amount of detail in a book of just over 250 pages. ( )

I was well into A Little History of Science when an awkwardly written sentence suggested to me that its intended audience probably skewed much younger than I am. (Page 67: “If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘rebel without a cause,’ then Galileo was a rebel with a cause.” Uh, okay.) I looked up the publisher’s website to see if I was inadvertently reading a children’s book (normally a publisher cannot put such a thing over on me). Yale University Press, in its caginess, laid it on rather thick; “With delightful illustrations and a warm, accessible style, this is a volume for young and old to treasure together.” After the briefest flicker of a thought that I should read this aloud to one or more family members, I realized that no one in my immediate family perceived him or herself as either old enough or young enough to enjoy this book in the togetherness that Yale UP envisioned. (Is there a word for a thought that is not fully formed before it disappears? Sadly, this history of science makes no mention of psychology.)

At this point in the book (page 67), I was, in my solitude, quite enjoying it. It was delivering on what I had understood to be the promise of its title, and I was smug in my grasp of the material. Alas, not too long after heliocentrism was firmly established, the book became, for me, less of a refresher. I began to founder in eighteenth-century chemistry, and was grateful for the occasional foray into the basics of evolutionary biology, paleontology, or plate tectonics, to which I clung as rocks in a sea of gases. But the sea always rose up again, threatening to drown me in smaller and smaller particles. Or quarks. Or bosons.

The thing about a “Little History” of probably anything is that if you don’t already understand, say, quantum mechanics, a few pages, however warmly and accessibly written, will not make the light bulb go on over your head. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe everyone else finished Chapter 32 (“The Game-Changer: Einstein”) and said--in chorus with their family members--“Now I get it!” Or maybe everyone else finished Chapter 32 and chortled smugly, “Tell me something else I already know.”

I’m not the right audience for this book. Perhaps I would have known that had Yale University Press said on its website: “This book is not for you if you are conversant with science up to the eighteenth century, don’t readily grasp certain scientific concepts even if they have been established for hundreds of years and have been explained to you numerous times since high school, and are kind of defensive about it.”

Sorry...that’s just my imbalance of black bile talking. ( )